WHOOPS! Vatican Lets Slip Plans For One World Government

In a widely-expected note on the financial crisis and economic justice, Vatican officials accidently call for the establishment of a One World Global "Authority" to regulate financial markets and national governments.

After gently noting that such a project is "a complex and delicate process," the document begins to capitalize the word, "Authority" in the most unsettling, conspiracy-launching way possible:

A supranational Authority of this kind should have a realistic structure and be set up gradually. It should be favourable to the existence of efficient and effective monetary and financial systems; that is, free and stable markets overseen by a suitable legal framework, well-functioning in support of sustainable development and social progress of all, and inspired by the values of charity and truth. It is a matter of an Authority with a global reach that cannot be imposed by force, coercion or violence, but should be the outcome of a free and shared agreement and a reflection of the permanent and historic needs of the world common good.

The document was issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, an obscure office in the Vatican that usually satisfies itself with issuing vague statements on social issues.

The text is a series of verbose and intensely boring ruminations on everything from credit instruments to technology, but here are some of the highlights for conspiracy theorists.

A brief summarization of the financial crisis:

Since the 1990s, we have seen that money and credit instruments worldwide have grown more rapidly than revenue, even adjusting for current prices. From this came the formation of pockets of excessive liquidity and speculative bubbles which later turned into a series of solvency and confidence crises that have spread and followed one another over the years.

A fond recollection of the Bretton-Woods agreement:

With regard to the current global economic and financial systems, two decisive factors should be stressed. The first is the gradual decline in efficacy of the Bretton Woods institutions beginning in the early 1970s. ... The second factor is the need for a minimum, shared body of rules to manage the global financial market which has grown much more rapidly than the real economy.

An assertion that nation-states are dissolving anyway, and that's mostly good, so let's have worldwide laws while we're at it:

Globalization, despite some of its negative aspects, is unifying peoples more and prompting them to move towards a new "rule of law" on the supranational level, supported by a more intense and fruitful collaboration.

A passage that seems to say that the Church should seek to promote "a new humanism" to serve as the ethical and cultural basis of world-government:

On the way to building a more fraternal and just human family and, even before that, a new humanism open to transcendence, Blessed John XXIII's teaching seems especially timely. In the prophetic Encyclical Pacem in Terris of 1963, he observed that the world was heading towards ever greater unification. He then acknowledged the fact that a correspondence was lacking in the human community between the political organization "on a world level and the objective needs of the universal common good"

(Here we thought the Catholic Church and the Popes were in the business of promoting Catholicism.)

But then there is also a statement that previous Popes have developed the power of positive thinking:

Paul VI emphasized the revolutionary power of "forward-looking imagination" that can perceive the possibilities inscribed in the present and guide people towards a new future. By freeing his imagination, man frees his existence.

A statement that the world government should be empowered to deal with the most minute and far-reaching aspects of human life:

Therefore, [the Authority] should be endowed with structures and adequate, effective mechanisms equal to its mission and the expectations placed in it. This is especially true in a globalized world which makes individuals and peoples increasingly interconnected and interdependent, but which also reveals the existence of monetary and financial markets of a predominantly speculative sort that are harmful for the real economy, especially of the weaker countries.

And a suggestion that the nations of the world should learn how to respect and recognize their differences in culture and viewpoint, that is, to dialogue with each other like Occupy Wall Street protestors:

A supranational Institution, the expression of a "community of nations", will not last long, however, if the countries' diversities from the standpoint of cultures, material and immaterial resources and historic and geographic conditions, are not recognized and fully respected.